Take Five jazz giant Dave Brubeck dies aged 91

Dave Brubeck was a jazz pioneer whose compositions included the classic Take Five (Picture: AP)

Pioneering jazz composer and pianist Dave Brubeck, who recorded the classic jazz hit Take Five, has died.

He suffered heart failure today while on his way to a cardiology appointment, the day before his 92nd birthday.

Brubeck’s style caught listeners’ ears with exotic, challenging rhythms in a career that spanned almost all American jazz since World War II.

The son of a Californian rancher, he formed The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 and, three years later, was the first modern jazz musician to be pictured on the cover of Time magazine. He helped define the swinging rhythms of 1950s and 1960s club jazz.

Time Out, the seminal album released by the quartet in 1959, was the first ever million-selling jazz LP, and is still among the best- selling jazz albums of all time.

It features two of his standards, Blue Rondo A La Turk and Take Five, the latter becoming the Quartet’s signature theme. Recorded in 5/4 time, it was composed by Brubeck’s saxophonist, Paul Desmond, and was used as the theme to TV programmes through the years.

In later years Brubeck composed music for operas and ballet.

In 1988, he played for Mikhail Gorbachev, at a dinner in Moscow that US president Ronald Reagan hosted for the Soviet leader.

In 2009, at the age of 88, Brubeck was still touring and receiving rave reviews, in spite of a viral infection that threatened his heart.

‘When you start out with goals – mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically – you never exhaust that,’ Brubeck said in 1995. ‘I started doing that in the 1940s. It’s still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.’